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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

I was working on a movie project with my students last week when I realised that some of my students had taken their videos upside down. I wanted an easy way to flip them. When I searched for instructions online I found all sorts of complex and convoluted methods. One method for using VLC to flip videos involved so many steps that I never did get through them all.

There are Iphone and Ipad apps that you can download to rotate the video on your device but ratings for these apps were not great and reviewers complained that the apps often crashed.

In the end I discovered that you can easily rotate movies using Windows Live Movie Maker. I don't recommend using Windows Movie Maker to make movies using Ipad footage because it often does not work but this product is ideal for quickly flipping videos for little or no fuss.

How to Flip your Ipad (or any other video) using Movie Maker
First - you will need to make sure your video is downloaded from your device to your computer. Find instructions for doing that here.
1) Open movie maker.

2) Add your video by Clicking on right pane that says "Click here to browse for videos and photos"

3) Select your video from the list and click open.

4) Click rotate button in the upper tool bar.

5) The movie will still appear to be upside down in right pane but will be right side up on the left hand side.

6) Your last step is to save your movie.

Tada. Relatively painless and pretty quick once you get the hang of it. You can then take the saved movie and transfer it to use in your projects.

So what did I learn at school today? Taking videos with Ipads is great fun but sometimes they will end up the wrong way up. Using Imovie or Windows Live Movie Maker for flipping videos is an easy way to save yourself a headache. Do you have a better way to flip movies around? Any tips for making sure kids are not filming upside down?